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- Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Antonio Banderas.
- Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity and language.
- Web site: 'The Other Man'
It's a loaded, leading question: "Do you think two people can live together all their lives?"
When it's a wife asking a husband and her follow-up is, "Do you never wish you might be given the chance to sleep with someone else?" alarm bells might start chiming or clanging. But she assures him of her love and suspicion melts away.
Until, some time later when she is gone and he finds evidence that indicates he was not the only lover in her life. There was ... or is ... "The Other Man."
Directed by Richard Eyre, "The Other Man" stars Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas and Romola Garai. It's based on a short story by Bernhard Schlink, whose book "The Reader" became an Oscar-winning project for Kate Winslet.
The story here feels thin and stretched to its limits and beyond, but it's the game-playing -- literal and figurative -- by Neeson and Banderas that compels your attention. Neeson, especially, is the Atlas of this movie as he holds it up; his face beautifully registers changes in his emotional temperature in carefully calibrated ways.
The ending is a little too adult and noble for my taste, but "The Other Man" is a well-acted (if unsatisfying) movie for grown-ups at a time when such films are an endangered species.
Opens today at the Squirrel Hill Theater.
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